1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a communications gateway for providing access to an enterprise server application from a Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) environment, and more specifically, to a gateway utility which provides an interactive interface to simplify the building of functions to access an enterprise On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) application from a DCOM environment.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The methods by which companies conduct business with their customers are undergoing fundamental changes, due in large part to World Wide Web technology. In addition, the same technology that makes a company accessible to the world, may be used on internal company networks for conducting operational and administrative tasks.
One of the technologies underlying the World Wide Web is the Web Browser. Web Browsers have become a de facto user interface standard because of their ability to interpret and display information having standard formats (e.g., HyperText Markup Language (HTML), standard test, GIF, etc.). Client software programs, popularly referred to as Web Browsers (e.g., Mosaic, Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer, etc.), execute on client systems and issue requests to server systems. The server systems typically execute HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP) server programs which process requests from the Web Browsers and deliver data to them. The system that executes an HTTP server program and returns data to the Web Browser will hereinafter be referred to as a Web Server System. An HTTP server program itself will be referred to as a Web Server.
A Web Server System has access to on-line documents that contain data written in HyperText Markup Language (HTML). The HTML documents contain display parameters, capable of interpretation by a Web Browser, and references to other HTML documents and Web Servers (source: World Wide Web: Beneath the Surf, from UCL Press, by Mark Handley and Jon Crowcroft, on-line at http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/jon/book/book.html).
As Web Browsers are making their mark as a "standard" user interface, many businesses have a wealth of information that is managed by prior art data base management systems such as DMS, RDMS, DB2, Oracle, Ingres, Sybase, Informix, and many others. In addition, many of the database management systems are available as resources in a larger transaction processing system. There are also mission critical applications which still reside on enterprise servers, since these type of systems have resiliency and recovery features historically not available on other smaller types of servers.
One key to the future success of a business may lie in its ability to capitalize on the growing prevalence of Web Browsers in combination with selectively providing access to the data that is stored in its databases. Common Gateway Interface programs are used to provide Web Browser access to such databases.
The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is a standard for interfacing external applications, such as Web Browsers, to obtain information from information servers, such as Web Servers. The CGI allows programs (CGI programs) to be referenced by a Web Browser and executed on the Web Server system. For example, to make a UNIX database accessible via the World Wide Web, a CGI program is executed on the Web Server system to transmit information to the database engine, receive the results from the database engine, and format the data in an HTML document which is returned to the Web Browser.
A disadvantage with the CGI program approach described above is that the application developer must be intimately acquainted with the HTML, the CGI, and the database engine. In addition, a different CGI program may be required for each different database, thus adding to the cost of creating and maintaining the database access for the Web Browser. Thus, the application developer is required to understand multiple types of systems, and must also understand how these systems interface. The learning curve for this type of development is therefore undesirably long.